


you're bound to see

by endquestionmark



Category: Fantastic Four (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 22:11:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4539273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s Reed,” Ben says, hands still up, a shrug now, and rubs the back of his neck.</p><p>“Of course it’s fucking Reed,” Johnny says, and closes his eyes; Ben watches him set his teeth into his lip, and doesn’t realize for a moment that Johnny’s watching him, again. “Reed, huh,” he says, and sighs. “Seems like there’s a whole lot of that going around.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're bound to see

**Author's Note:**

> The author is dead and these fuckers belong to me now. I'm confiscating them. This is canon-divergent in that it is a story where Reed brings Ben on before they finish or test the gate, and I suggest that you direct blame to [Alis](http://alisand.tumblr.com/), who was, as always, an enabler supreme.

It’s a lab, right; it’s not so different from a shop, except the white coats. Ben could definitely live without the white coats. He could also live without getting woken up by Reed at all hours of the day and night — _I’m shifting the parabolic reflectors_ , the coolant needs rerouting to avoid a bank of servers which aren’t even part of the gate control system, _I forgot how to use the Keurig_ , and who cares about a Keurig when between him and Johnny they can rig up an old Mr. Coffee to make it twice as strong — but hey, what’s new. Reed used to lurk around the junkyard until the dogs threw themselves at the fence, never did manage to make friends with them, but it didn’t matter, since Ben always snuck out anyway. It never occurred to Reed to throw pebbles, or, fuck’s sake, even leave a message; if he waited, his logic went, then Ben would come, and Ben always did. It’s probably his fault, come to think of it, for encouraging him.

Anyway, Reed had asked this time, like he always does, at a time of morning that Ben’s only used to seeing from the other side, pulling his pillow over his head to block out the queasy lightening of the sky and not thinking about the bruises over his kidneys, say, or the metallic taste and sudden awareness of a loosened tooth. He’s used to being pulled out of trouble, not into it, though when Reed gets involved everything turns upside-down. Reed had called him, voice tinny and indistinct — shitty reception and a shitty phone — and said, “Ben, I need you — I won’t do this without you — you have to come,” and, right. He had gone, like always.

There aren’t any windows, because they’re working underground. Ben can’t say that he likes it, but he gets it. Explosions are easier to contain when there’s a minimum of glass nearby, and ten feet of concrete on every side is hard to justify in a skyscraper. It means that time gets indistinct, though, blue-tinted morning blurring into yellow-lit night, and so he doesn’t know what time it is when the kid walks in with his broken arm, bearing that’s somewhere between fuck-you cocky and fuck-me confident. Johnny moves like he knows the space, though he doesn’t seem the underground lab type, and when he shakes Reed’s hand, Ben knows that look on his face the way he knows how to snap a curveball. It’s muscle memory, more than ten years’ worth of wondering whether Reed even lives on the same planet as the rest of them, from his dad’s musty garage to high school gyms to his dorm room, following an impossible dream, and wondering all the time if he’s the only one who realizes the sheer lunacy of it all.

“Is he always like that?” Johnny asks, later, when they’ve watched Reed shut his hand in a drawer twice in a row without actually getting the multimeter he was looking for to begin with.

Ben doesn’t even need to ask what Johnny means. “Ever since he was a kid,” he says, leaning on the console. They’re in the control room, which is probably a mistake, but it means that they can see the entire floor — or at least Reed, stumbling around competently as usual — but not hear him, which is a relief.

“You’ve known him since he was a kid,” Johnny says incredulously. “You ever want to just—” He mimes slapping someone around the head.

“Oh yeah,” Ben says. “Doesn’t work.”

“Figures,” Johnny says, and takes a sip of the shitty watery tasteless coffee that Reed insists on making whenever nobody’s around to stop him. “This,” he says, “is shit.”

“Usually we keep an eye on him and just—” Ben spreads his hands, shifts a little from side to side “—keep him from getting to it first.” He jerks his thumb at the Keurig. “One day I’m going to use that for parts and rig him up a personal supply of ditchwater.”

“You could just strap it to his head,” Johnny says, contemplative, and takes another sip. He makes a face and puts the mug down. “It’s so bad,” he says, “but it just — no, okay, enough, that’s it — fuck this,” and he takes it over to the corner sink. “Why do I keep drinking it?”

“Force of habit,” Ben says, turned around to watch him. “Hell of a thing.”

“No way,” Johnny says. “Definitely chemicals.”

There’s a crash. Ben doesn’t even bother to look out at the floor.

“Hey,” Reed calls, “nothing urgent, guys, but there’s a problem with the supports under the platform — sort of the main supports — it’s fine, it’s actually really interesting, the aux pipes seem to have taken most of the weight, but—”

He breaks off, either because he’s actually finally been flattened, or because he’s gotten distracted by the unexpected structural integrity of the gate’s cooling system. Probably it’s the one with more science and less discomfort. Reed’s terrible at discomfort, takes a stubbed toe personally, and he probably wouldn’t even have the grace to be crushed quietly.

Johnny sighs and puts the mug in the sink, jerks his head at the door. “Just—” he says, and mimes smacking Reed again. “I’d feel a hell of a lot better, anyway.”

Ben watches the pull of his shirt over his shoulders, the way his bearing isn’t so much certain now as compelled, and doesn’t need to know it like muscle memory, because in a second he’ll follow, just like he always does, whether or not Reed asks.

Turns out that it isn’t just hours that get lost underground, but days; more often than not, Ben ekes out a few hours of sleep on the break room couch set up for the late night pushes when they have to set up an entire structural element before it’s stable enough to leave unsupported. He wakes up with polyester weave printed on his face, and glares at the coffee drip as if that’ll make it brew faster, and then it’s back to work. He’s working with the moving components, while Reed fusses with schematics and wiring and Johnny takes up Ben’s usual role, which is mostly making sure that Reed doesn’t actually die by paper cut, at least before they finish the gate.

It’s weeks, then, before he really gets a chance to take a break; it doesn’t feel like it, but that’s because he honestly can’t tell whether they’ve been in the lab for weeks or months. It’s not like he isn’t allowed to go out, either, but the city isn’t for him; where Reed sees a crowded crosswalk and insinuates himself, fits here like he was meant to be, Ben tries to shoulder through, doesn’t feel like this place likes him. The sooner they get this done, the sooner he can — and there his thoughts tend to stop, because — what? Find somewhere else? Go back to the junkyard? His ma’s been making noises about community college, because it’s been long enough out of high school that he should think about things like that, but Ben doesn’t know what he’d learn from technical school that he couldn’t already pick up on his own.

 _Follow Reed somewhere else_ , he doesn’t think, and doesn’t know whether it’s because he doesn’t want to admit it or because it’s beyond admission, so inevitable that it’s hardly worth thinking about. Doesn’t really matter either way, because he’s not the only one. Johnny isn’t that much younger than him — going to Binghamton next fall, taking a year out to work and figure out what he wants to focus on, which he’d said like someone fully aware of the bullshit coming out of their mouth, and saying it anyway — but the way he looks at Reed is so familiar to Ben that he can’t look at it, sometimes. It makes him want to collar one of the lab techs and say: _Do I look like that?_ He doesn’t, though, because he doesn’t want to know the answer, doesn’t know what he’d do with the inevitable _yes_.

He could ask Sue, if he wanted. She wouldn’t lie to him. She just wouldn’t answer, which would be the same as the _yes_ , but somehow better, but she’s already working on shielding, and anyway Ben gets the sense that the less she has to think about Reed Richards, the happier she is. He can’t quite say the same, but he wishes he could. He could ask Victor, but Victor seems like the sort to either ignore anything that isn’t his own problem or rib him about it so much that he’d have to pick a fight about it, skin too thin to let it glance off as the result of living in each other’s pockets for so long. Dr. Storm probably wouldn’t be too happy about that, and Ben doesn’t want to think about being removed from the project, leaving Reed alone when — and, again, and always — he’d asked.

Anyway, weeks, and too many of them, or at least too many for him to keep track. They’re all wearing on each other, too many misplaced wrenches and blueprints for any number of people to argue about at any given time for them not to, and Reed is in fine form. He’s actually sleeping, because he has some plan in his head about how everything needs to be done, and in what order, but he doesn’t want to fucking share it with anybody until he absolutely has to, because that means that he’s the smartest one in the room, and he doesn’t realize that the rest of them are losing sleep over it. Sue has to take him aside and interact with him for long enough to pry the details of the shuttle pressurization out of him, so that she can design the suits to compensates, and Johnny sleeps less and less, and Ben watches it all helplessly and hopes for a miracle.

It doesn’t come, obviously, because they aren’t that lucky. Johnny gets his cast off, and Reed comes into the lab bright-eyed in the mornings, and Sue just gets more intense, focused entirely on her technical parameters as an alternative to dealing with the implosion of the people around her. Ben isn’t watching the floor when Johnny comes into the break room, looking for something that Reed put down and won’t actually bother to name beyond “that, the thing, I was holding it at lunch”, and Ben thinks about all the stupid shit that he did to think about something else for a while, growing up Reed’s best friend. Ten feet of concrete don’t really lend themselves to stupid shit.

“Any luck?” Reed calls, because he has the worst timing in history, and the self-awareness of the average flathead screwdriver, and Ben watches Johnny, coiled tight like a spring, and realizes that this is the moment before he snaps and pushes back. The thing is that it won’t do any good. Reed won’t realize that Johnny’s angry, or if he does, he won’t realize why. He won’t change any of the things that he does, or the way that he acts, and that’ll just wind Johnny up more, and there’s nowhere for an explosion to go here but in.

Johnny wheels around and opens his mouth, and Ben’s on his feet before he knows it, because this is what he does. He does stupid shit so that Reed doesn’t have to. “Check the observation deck,” he yells out the door, and then kicks it shut; the only light in the room is the fluorescents, which haven’t been changed in years, and it’s suddenly quiet without the echoes of work from the floor.

Johnny, right up in his face, says, “What the _fuck?_ ” Ben doesn’t listen, doesn’t back down, just makes himself as big as he can, shoulders and stance, and backs Johnny up like that until he hits the wall, even though he has to look down at Ben.

“It won’t help,” Ben says, and holds his hands up before Johnny can reply. “No, come on, I know this shit, it’s been years. It never helps. You just have to leave him alone until you can stand him again, he doesn’t realize—”

“How the _fuck_ doesn’t he realize?” Johnny says, a little less furious, but no less frustrated. “I mean, come on, we’re all around him all the time, it’s all about him and his project — he says _jump_ , man, and — how does he not _know?_ ”

“It’s Reed,” Ben says, and he can’t help getting a little angry, too, about how he has to do this, about how Reed never cleans up any of his own messes. “Take it or leave it, what can I say?”

“I—” Johnny starts, and seems to run out of words, suddenly. “How—”

“It’s Reed,” Ben says, hands still up, a shrug now, and rubs the back of his neck.

“Of course it’s fucking Reed,” Johnny says, and closes his eyes; Ben watches him set his teeth into his lip, and doesn’t realize for a moment that Johnny’s watching him, again. “Reed, huh,” he says, and sighs. “Seems like there’s a whole lot of that going around.”

“Look,” Ben says, and doesn’t know what else to say.

It doesn’t matter, though, because Johnny settles a hand on the back of his neck. “Come on,” he says, “it’s not like I don’t know — you know, too, I’ve seen you—” and kisses him like he’s trying to prove it, make it mean something.

“Hey,” Ben says, or tries to say, against his mouth, but leans into it, because it’s not like they don’t know, really. It’s not about them. It’s about the impossibility being sketched in metal and solder and glass on the floor, about someone else’s dream, but with the door closed and the hum of the fluorescents, they can at least pretend that it isn’t. “Hey,” he says, again, and shoves Johnny back properly this time, grabs him by his shoulders and uses every ounce of his weight to pin him to the wall. It’s not worth much — Johnny’s taller than him and broader in the shoulders, could throw him off he tried — but Johnny doesn’t, and lets Ben kiss him breathless, all force and fury, and gives as good as he gets.

It’s not like they have a lot of time or privacy, even with the locked door between them and the lab; anyway, Ben doesn’t get the sense that Johnny wants it sweet, not when he’s this desperate. He goes for Johnny’s belt, spits in his hand, and holds Johnny’s hips against the wall as best he can with one hand, jerks him off fast and rough. It isn’t careful, or even particularly caring, but that’s probably for the best. Johnny pushes into his hand, and Ben plants a hand in the center of his chest and holds him back. He can’t help watching Johnny’s face, and the way he leans back, closes his eyes as his breath comes faster. Ben wonders what he’s thinking of, and what he’s imagining; he’s under no impressions about who, at least.

Ben isn’t sure if he’s being kind or cruel when he leans in, doesn’t let up the rhythm of his hand, and says, low in Johnny’s ear, “What if he _does_ know?”

“Fuck,” Johnny gasps, “oh,” and snaps his hips forward once, twice, smacks his hand against the wall as he comes. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Ben says, and tugs him down for another kiss, grinds against Johnny’s thigh. It’s a dangerous thought, mostly because it’s almost certainly not the case; Reed has never learned a fact that he hasn’t immediately put into action, or at least use, but it’s something to keep for the times when he’s alone at night, too wired to sleep but too tired to fight.

“Sounds like you’ve thought about it,” Johnny says, still out of breath, but he settles a hand low on Ben’s back, pulls him closer. “That what you’re thinking when you’re watching him work, huh?”

Ben can’t deny it, necessarily, but it’s not as urgent as it used to be, whatever it is — anger or something worse, he doesn’t bother trying to figure it out anymore — settled into static in the back of his mind, something he can ignore or at least bear for the most part. Now, though, Johnny says, “Bet you think about him pinning you, huh, easy as anything,” and lets his thigh ride up between Ben’s legs, tugs him forward so that Ben can’t ignore how easy it is for Johnny to move him to where he wants him, one hand on his back and one on his hip, just the fact of his strength.

Reed could, is the thing, for all that he doesn’t; he’s held Ben back from fights, pushed him out of the way of errant spark showers. It’s something that Ben forgets, when possible, because it’s just more static that he doesn’t need. He thinks about it now, though — Reed, behind him, pressing him against the wall; Reed’s hands on his wrists, Reed’s hands on his hips — and when Johnny kisses him again it isn’t assertion, but assurance; it’s Reed’s easy certainty, thorough and definite, and Ben doesn’t know who he’s thinking of when he comes, whether it’s Johnny holding him upright or the Reed that he can’t quite stop imagining.

“Shit,” Ben says, because he needs a minute to get himself together, but also because: _shit_.

“No shit,” Johnny says, in reply, and Ben stares at him for a moment, uncomprehending, before he gets it, the accidental absurdity of it all, and starts to laugh. It’s a fucking mess, really; there’s nothing funny about any of it, not Reed in a vault that he chose for himself, not all of them following him into hell for neither love nor money. It’s fucked up, and it’ll come crashing down on all their heads sooner or later.

“Dr. Storm!” Reed yells, very, very faintly, but still loud enough that they can hear it.

 _Fuck_ , Ben thinks, because it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter how fucked up this is, or how badly they’ll all get hurt, not as long as Reed gets his miracle. It’s all that’s ever mattered, and when Ben looks at Johnny’s face, he knows that Johnny knows it too, like — gravity, or combustion — some inescapable law of the universe, a fact simply because it is one.

“Dr. Storm,” Reed shouts, closer now, “I think I’ve got something,” and Ben closes his eyes, waits for him to call, knows that Johnny’s doing the same, keeps right on waiting.


End file.
